Climate change: Recent stirrings in the UK underground jolt Riddim.ca back to life… Kicking off our open-ended investigation of London’s rapidly mutating house scene, we sit down for an email exchange with Roska. With a foot in broken beat and shades of grime, his new EP Climate Change maintains a healthy balance between houseful sensuousness and rugged riddimic experimentation. It’s also getting caned by DJs from Marcus Nasty to kode9. Get to know Roska…

It’s time to revive ‘Forward Sound,’ though maybe in the plural. Circa 2003 that was the open-ended term that used to describe what eventually became dubstep, along with a tangle of threads that split off or got left behind. Just like house first meant “what they play at the Warehouse,” it was a reference to the club night itself, the only place where you could hear as yet unnamed new mutations of the garage machine, whether in the form of Ghost, Landslide, Menta, kode9, Plasticman, Hatcha, Slimzee, etc, etc. And of course it was hardly a ’sound’ at all. Virtually every artist operating under that banner was a sound unto themselves and the Forward style could only ever be a snapshot of those trajectories out of UK garage that happened to be coinciding on a given Thursday night or in narrow bands of pirate ether.

Spurred by the launch of the Hyperdub archive at Riddim.ca, Brazilian dubstep boss Bruno Belluomini got in touch, recently, with a few questions for a short feature at Tranquera.org. Since the site is all in Portuguese (I don’t remember writing in Portguese, but anyway) I thought I’d print the English version here.

OTTAWA, ON, January 3, 2007 – Riddim.ca (TSX: RDM) announces a strategic content-sharing alliance with South London-based Hyperdub.com (FTSE: HDB). The 1.2 Mb acquisition makes Riddim.ca the official unhome of the original Hyperdub.com 2step Garage archive which had been unavailable to consumers since the 2005 restructuring of Hyperdub’s online presence.

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Riddim.ca was founded by DJ/writer paul autonomic (aka Mr. Bump) in February 2005 as a hub for North America's nascent grime and dubstep scenes. Since then we've helped promote events across the continent and made friends around the world. Mostly dormant now, we're host to one of the web's largest collections of writing on the late-Garage dis/continuum as well as a growing collection of rare audio and scans (coming eventually).